Cloud Serpent Mount, Dynamic Quest Rewards, Blue Posts

It's April 2nd in enough timezones to stop the sillyness! Yes, everything was a fake, including the new Jaina model with her awesome tramp stamp. We're going back to regular news, and to an insane amount of blue posts we've missed/skipped over the past week.

Cloud Serpents Mount Video Preview
The Cloud Serpents are definitely the most popular mount in MIsts of Pandaria so far and I finally found the time to make a real preview of the mount with actual, in-game footage. I also added a couple of raw footage for all the recolors for those of you who want to spend a little more time inspecting one specific color.

Mists of Pandaria Dynamic Quest Rewards
One of the interesting change made to leveling in the expansion is the quest rewards. In Mists of Pandaria, quests no longer have predetermined rewards and they have been replaced with dynamic rewards depending on which class you're playing.

For example, this is the rewards for the first horde quest of the expansion, from the point of view of 3 different classes.

Each class gets a different weapon, and hybrid classes get to choose between multiple weapons based on their specialization. You don't have to run a bunch of quests that won't give you anything useful for your plate tanking gear, and you don't have to spend forever trying to figure out where you can get an upgrade for your weapon!

In the case of this quest, this is all the possible weapon rewards you could get:

Of course the system could get much more interesting as leveling progresses, with instance quests always rewarding you with an useful blue item for your specialization, etc ...

Class Blue Posts

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

Death Knight (Forums)Death Strike Healing not Working
There is a bug that prevents Death Strike from healing at all at the moment on beta. This is the kind of thing we should be able to hotfix. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Druid (Forums)Allow me to play as Balance without looking ridiculous.
We want to clarify a bit more about the Moonkin model update being "in the schedule." Essentially this means that though it is on the way, it is not currently intended to be ready for the launch of Mists of Pandaria. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Monk (Forums)Monks Aren't Fun to Level
There are apparently some bugs in what levels monks get certain abilities. There should not be big level gaps in any class until you start hitting the 50s.

Overall, classes should still get new abilities at about the same rate they always did. We shifted some around to where they would make more sense (e.g. Shadow priests need some heals, but not nearly as many as a Disc priest) but those gaps are made up for by old talents that are no spec-specific spells. Using priests as an example again, all Holy priests get Chakra instead of having to spend a (no-brainer) talent point on them.

Feedback on specific monk abilities is appreciated. We just didn't want you to blame the talent changes for an apparent lack of abilities. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Chi Wave
The design of Chi Wave is that it jumps from hostile to friendly to hostile to friendly and so on. It prefers the closest target, and in the next build will try to perfer players over pets and guardians. The way we use it internally is to cast it on the tanks, which causes it to hit the boss, and then back to the tank and so on. We agree missing is pretty punitive, but I believe Mistweavers don't yet have the Spirit to hit conversion mechanic of healers. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Monk Feedback
Thanks for the feedback, everyone. Monks are a new class, and we will be iterating on them quite a bit and often we change mechanics a lot faster than we make beta builds. With that in mind, we wanted to clarify our design intent on some of the abilities:

Dizzying Haze -- We increased the threat and lowered the energy. We're not crazy about making it do damage because then it risks competing with other Brewmaster abilities. We really don't want Dizzying Haze used rotationaly on single-targets. We also run into whether or not the ability should break CC if it does damage.

AE tanking -- We agree that monks need a little more ability to cleave.

Paladin (Forums)Protection Paladin Design
You shouldn't have to "wait to do things" much. The Protection rotation should include Avenger's Shield, Crusader Strike, Judgment, Consecration and Holy Wrath, with Shield of the Righteous and Word of Glory as finishers. You should almost always have a button to push. We don't have a problem with occasional holes in the rotation, so long as those don't occur with frustrating regularity. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Shaman (Forums)Lava Lash Tooltip ErrorLava Lash does still spread Flame Shock, but the tooltip was, strangely, updated and no longer say it spreads Flame Shock.
Yes, this is just a tooltip error. The design intent is that Lava Lash spreads Flame Shock.

There is a minor glyph that lets you turn the Flame Shock spread off (which is sometimes useful to shaman), but the tooltip appears as if you always have the glyph even when you do not. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Warlock (Forums)Warlock Tanking
Just to make our intent clear, the Glyph of Demon Hunting isn't intended to turn Demonology warlocks into a tanking spec. You won't be able to queue as a tank for Dungeon Finder for instance and won't have the survivability or tools of say a Protection paladin.

Historically, warlocks felt tankier than other casters and could even off-tank some encounters. We have made an effort in Mists to recapture some of that flavor. A warlock with this glyph should feel like they are about as effective tanking as an Arms warrior who pulls out a shield and swaps to Defensive Stance, or a Feral druid who goes into Bear form. You might be able to off-tank adds or pick up an actual boss for a short period of time if the tank goes down.

To make warlocks an actual tank would take more significant changes. For example, we want tanks to have to pick up separate tanking gear than their DPS gear (this is even true of druids) and want tanks to have to give up some of their DPS potential in exchange for their survivability. In short, it needs to be a commitment, and that's the sort of thing that needs larger gameplay changes than just a glyph.

That shouldn't stop the glyph of Demon Hunting from being fun though. As you can probably tell, we are trying to make even the major glyphs more about character customization and fun.

As some of you have pointed out, the glyph of Demon Hunting in your beta build doesn't deliver on what I described above as the design. The newer version of the glyph, hopefully available in the next beta build, allows a warlock to toggle in and out of the off-tank / survival mode, more like the druid going Bear or the warrior going Defensive.

The new shapeshift granted by the glyph is called Threatening Presence (PH) and adds Taunt and Fury Ward to the normal Metamorphosis toolkit. You still get the damage reduction from mastery instead of the damage boost from mastery while in this form. You can also choose to go into normal Metamorphosis even if you have the glyph. Let us know how it feels.

We appreciate all the feedback and passion on this topic. We expected this glyph would serve a pretty niche community and were surprised at how many players were excited about it. We are still in beta and are still very much experimenting with what kind of gamplay we can deliver in glyphs. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Warlock Fire
So we’ve obtained some additional insight about what exactly lies behind the use of the word “hope” in regard to our efforts to achieve green fire for warlocks. Essentially, we want this updated information out so that we can better manage expectations, especially as the announcement created such a flurry of excitement.

Unfortunately, dear warlocks, those of you who retained a modicum of skepticism were right to, as it would seem that the chance of green fire for warlocks is even less as likely as the wording of the original information indicated.

Since spell effects are not as simple to change around as — for example — druid forms are, we need some additional technology implemented in order to allow the use of red or green fire to be a player choice and not a permanent change that is put in place for all warlocks.

Also, technology aside, we want to do the introduction of something like green fire in the right way. Implementing it in “a quest” doesn’t really explain our stance here. We want something as substantial as this change to be an epic accomplishment for you.

So though we have definitely heard your thoughts on the matter, and we’ve explained what we want to do from our side, green fire will not be available with the launch of Mists of Pandaria. And we haven’t a timeframe to commit to, or communicate about, at this stage.

It is with regret that we were unable to clarify these details more when we first mentioned our intent — “our hope” — and we wish we hadn’t caused such excitement and raised expectations for those that didn’t instantly take the news with an “I’ll believe it when I see it” pinch of salt. It seems, as many of us said at the time here and on Twitter and fansites, the proof of the (green fire) pudding really was in the eating. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Warrior (Forums)Protection Warrior Design
We wanted to clarify a little the direction we are trying to go with Protection warriors and ultimately all tanks.

You generate rage through auto attacks. You also have some sources of rage more under your control, such as shouts, Charge, and in particular Shield Slam (the same is true of MS or BT if you are Arms or Fury). You no longer generate rage from taking damage, because we found that it basically meant Prot warriors always had infinite rage, so the resource wasn't relevant to gameplay. We think classes are more fun and interesting when they have to manage, even to a small extent, some resource.

For Protection, we expect you to spend most of your rage on Shield Block. Shield Block is not an emergency button. It generally won't save your life. But this is a good thing. Emergency buttons with resource costs aren't reliable. On the other hand using Shield Block (or Shield Barrier for magic damage) will make a difference over the course of a fight. It will help your healers out. It will slightly blunt spikes. Shield Block has no cool down, allowing you to use it more frequently when you have lots of rage, but also letting you play a little with when you use it. If you know a big hit is coming soon, you can delay the block for a few seconds. Otherwise, you can use it, knowing you'll have rage soon for another one.

One of the changes for old time Prot warriors is getting used to not spamming Heroic Strike. Think of HS (and Cleave) as an alternative to Shield Block for times when you don't need to worry about blocking, such as when you are soloing, off-tanking or doing easy content. If you use too many Heroic Strikes, you won't have rage for Shield Block as well. Your other attacks, Devastate, Revenge, Shield Slam and Thunder Clap, should fill in most of the holes in your rotation and should be sufficient for holding threat without HS spam.

As I mentioned recently, Prot warrior damage is probably 50% of where it needs to be. When we have that adjusted, your threat will be higher and those Shield Slam and Revenge hits in particular should feel meatier.

If you are a Guardian Druid, there are a lot of analogues. Notice what costs rage, and don't spend it on the wrong things. If you are a Prot paladin, spend your Holy Power mostly on Shield of the Righteous (in this case for damage and mitigation). If you are a Blood DK, your rotation isn't that different than it is on live.

We will ultimately balance all of the tanks around their suite of survival mechanics. Just be aware that we balance based on typical group situations and not how long a tank can go without getting a heal. If a tank can be two shot by a boss (assuming appropriate gear and skill), it's a design problem. If a tank is getting four or five shot, it's a healer problem.

P.S. Standard caveat that our design intent here is to make things more fun overall, not to nerf anybody. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Thunder ClapTC's attack power scaling was removed. It is gone.
That doesn't sound like something we would document. Do you remember where you saw it? In any case, it isn't accurate. Thunder Clap has a 0.456 attack power coefficient. We cleaned up a lot of melee tooltips to remove "scales with attack power" because it is pretty much always true. We don't say for Flash Heal "scales with spell power." It's just superfluous.

There is a general problem where Protection warrior damage is much too low across the board. That is something we are working on. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Blue Posts

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

New Quest Reward System
Offering quest rewards this way is a change for us, and the kind of thing for which we could definitely use feedback.

For the players that level as X spec but want to also collect gear as Y spec, we have a few solutions:

Several of the zones have vendors with decent gear that isn't quite at the quest item level. These help provide coverage if you miss a reward, say gloves or shoulders, since questing is less linear now. However, these vendors also help you gather off-spec gear.

Several quests, especially those that offer blue rewards, weapons, trinkets and most of the level 90 quests, offer you a choice of gear for all of your specs instead of just your current spec.

Because the questing in zones isn't as linear as Cataclysm, and because there are two zones per level in some cases, you'll have the option to hit some quests as spec A and some quests as spec B.

There are still other sources of gear, such as crafting, the AH, dungeons, faction rep and so on.

Also remember that if, for example, you level as Arms but want to tank a few dungeons as Protection, that the level-up dungeons are not so brutally difficult that you need full tanking gear. A Prot warriors in DPS Strength gear would do just fine. As you get into endgame content, especially normal raids, you'll want actual tanking gear.

We don't players to have to feel like they should do this. Keep in mind that you would need to be pretty min-max focused to agonize over whether you want the healing or the DPS legs when you'll probably get a new set of legs in an hour or two. It starts to matter more as you get closer to level 90 and the rate of upgrade slows down, but as I said, you'll generally get options on those quests. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Tiller Farm
A little snippet of information for you: your farm will be visible only to yourself. So nobody's going to come by and poach your crops... or, I guess, water your plants while you're away!

I’m a warrior who has hunted down dragons and demons, so why would I go work on a farm?
As with anything in the game, the idea is if it's not for you, you can leave it and concentrate on other things. One of the themes you might have noticed in Mists of Pandaria is that we're trying to ensure a range of fun options. Hopefully you can pick and choose which ones interest you and focus on them. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Cooking Changes
So you might have heard for Cooking in Mists of Pandaria we will have specializations. At the moment we're looking at around 5 branches of cooking, for example: broiling, steaming...etc.

Each of these specializations will focus on a particular stat. So let's say the Steaming specialization allows you to create Agility food. A rogue would find that very interesting, and would probably want to max that one out first. At which point, said rogue would be able to create Agility buff feasts for groups. Cool, huh? But worry not, once you max out in one specialization, you can then work on the other specializations.

Maybe they're gonna make it take ages to fully train all of them.
Well, maybe not ages. But it does mean that until enough time passes for you to train all specializations, you need to—er—specialize. Actually it's the way for other crafting professions too. For example, my jewelcrafter specialized in spell related stat recipes first, since of all my multitude of alts, I prefer my casters. Eventually, of course, she learned many more recipes and of course so did other crafters, so the market changed. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Lilian Voss
In Mists of Pandaria, we finally catch up with Lilian Voss. For those who didn't play through the Forsaken starting experience, Lilian Voss was brought back to life by Sylvanas, but despite this she refused to become part of the Forsaken.

After trying to re-connect with her still living father, those players with keen eyes might have noticed her handiwork in Western Plaguelands. As a non-aligned "free agent," Lilian has some surprising hidden talents. In Mists of Pandaria she's still confused about her situation. Still broiling with internal conflict, despising what she has become.

Now she has a new and grander mission in mind and it revolves around Scholomance and Darkmaster Gandling in particular. She wants to ensure that like herself, no others shall be raised from death and subjugated. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

DoTA Style Battleground as a Potential E-sport
The biggest problem with releasing this battleground is that it requires some new tech, however we would very much love to be able to release the DotA-style Battleground during the Mists of Pandaria Life cycle.

Regarding this particular battleground becoming an eSport, I see that as all depending on the community and the support that it is given. I personally would love to see more World of Warcraft eSports, I find myself spending loads of time watching streams and videos of arena and rated battlegrounds...they are ridiculously entertaining! (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Outland update.
Especially in comparison to the revamped 1-60 experience, we feel the pacing of Outland is a bit awkward at the moment. This is something we might try and work on.
Having Wrath as the weakest link in the chain? Not so bad, in my opinion.
And in our opinion too. Well, no... we don't think Wrath content is weak, we spent a lot of time lovingly crafting that place. In fact, we don't think it needs as many adjustments as perhaps Outland does, if any.

I'd rather they just reworked the leveling experience to not include Outland anymore
Well it might be more feasible to re-work the 1-60 content to avoid Outland (or Northrend) if it was "just" to skip 5 levels of content. But we don't want to somehow try to stretch 1-60 to cover 10 extra levels, let alone 20. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Pandaren mount is a yak?
So no, the Yak mounts are not the racial mounts for Pandaren. We're still thinking about how we want Yak mounts to be obtained. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Circumvention of Battleground Balancing Measures via Addons
This is not something that we are encouraging, but it is also something that we currently have no realistic way to prevent. That being said, this is something that may change soon, which is why we always advise people to not use any type of add-on designed to circumvent or bend our balancing safeguards... using such add-ons can lead to severe account penalties! (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Horde not as Appealing to Female Gamers
To answer the question in the title, I think the majority of responses in this thread show that female gamers like to play Horde characters just as much as Alliance. It's purely down to personal taste.

I play a nice range of characters across both factions, and I feel the options available for each side match the spirit of the faction. Any 'pretty' missing for Horde females was more than made up for when blood elves joined back in TBC, and goblins are adorable!

Having said that, what changes would you all like to see to the models to make them more appealing to play, besides those already mentioned? (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Poll: VoIP Clients

What VoIP method do you use when playing games?Curse Weekly Roundup
Pico gives us news on Notch creating a Firefly game, updates on WoW: Mists of PandarIa, rumors on X-Box 720 and PS4 consoles, Smithsonian opens The Art Of Video Games, Athene charity, Save the Children, Operation: ShareCraft, Eve Dust trailer, and our indie game spotlight on "Warp".

This is not something that we are encouraging, but it is also something that we currently have no realistic way to prevent. That being said, this is something that may change soon, which is why we always advise people to not use any type of add-on designed to circumvent or bend our balancing safeguards... using such add-ons can lead to severe account penalties!

I believe you mixed this one up, this is a "perform AV enabler" blue response, not a monk chi-wave one.

"This is not something that we are encouraging, but it is also something that we currently have no realistic way to prevent. That being said, this is something that may change soon, which is why we always advise people to not use any type of add-on designed to circumvent or bend our balancing safeguards... using such add-ons can lead to severe account penalties!"

I believe this is the "perform AV enabler" blue response, not the monk chi-wave one.

So they FINALLY added in class/spec specific quest rewards? Why are they continuing to add things to the game that are like, 10 years behind when they're needed? AOE Looting being another recent thing..

So bear with me here....since the 50 mount achievement reward BEFORE WotLK was an Albino drake (think of it as a blank slate for all the drakes that were to come)....150 mount achievement is going to be the black cloud serpent...I can feeeeel it....please please please....

I appreciate the videos and such, but calm down with constant view spins. Just run the camera like you would if you were using the mount- how people will be seeing it 99% of the time. I get you're showing every inch of the model while in motion, just go straight without spinning the camera for 10 seconds too.